Altering temporal dynamics of sleepiness and mood during sleep deprivation: evidence from resting-state EEG microstates

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Sleep deprivation has been shown to negatively affect mood and sleepiness on both subjective and objective measures, as well as behavioral and neuroimaging levels. Nevertheless, few studies have clarified the relationship between abnormal brain dynamic activity after sleep deprivation and the impairment of mood and drowsiness from a temporal dynamics perspective. EEG microstate analysis could be served as a powerful tool to explore the large-scale dynamics of brain networks. METHODS: A strict sleep deprivation protocol was adopted in this study to collect resting-state EEG data, subjective sleepiness, objective alertness, and mood assessments from 71 participants after both normal sleep and sleep deprivation conditions. We applied the most recent technique in resting state microstate analysis to compare the differences in microstate time parameters between the sleep control (SC) and sleep-deprived (SD) conditions. Furthermore, we investigated the relationships between alterations in these time parameters and subjective/objective measures of sleepiness, as well as mood changes between SC and SD. RESULTS: Microstate B mean duration and occurrence were significantly decreased by sleep deprivation, whereas microstate C duration and occurrence increased. The decrease in class B occurrence was significantly correlated with the increased Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS) score, while the reduction in B duration was indicative of the increased response time of the Psychomotor Vigilance Performance (PVT). There was no statistically significant association found between the microstate parameter characteristics and the decline in positive mood between SC and SD. Person correlation analysis was carried out on the positive mood scores under the SC and SD conditions, respectively, to look into this further. The findings demonstrated a significant positive relationship between positive mood scores and the mean duration of microstate B under SD conditions. CONCLUSIONS: In a larger sleep deprivation dataset, mood and sleepiness were thoroughly examined using microstate analysis, which took into account both subjective and objective aspects of sleepiness. According to this study, subjective/objective sleepiness and positive mood were associated with the decreased B. This finding may reveal that the neural dynamics of the visual network have been compromised due to deprivation.